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2011Erskine Childers, The riddle of the sands.Victor Ehrenberg, From Solon to Socrates.Philip Hoare, Spike Island : the memory of a military hospital.Richard Holmes, Redcoat : the British soldier in the age of horse and musket.E. F. Knight, The cruise of the Alerte.Dwight Long, Sailing all seas in the Idle Hour.Josephine Marchant, Decoding the heavens.Reviel Netz, The Archimedes codex.Arthur Ransome, Racundra's third cruise.William Albert Robinson, Deep water and shoal.Dava Sobel, Longitude.Robert M. Thompson, Ransome's Foreign Legion.Joyce Tyldesley, Cleopatra : last queen of Egypt.Toby A. H. Wilkinson, The rise and fall of ancient Egypt.

2009Antony Beevor, Berlin : the downfall 1945.Richard Dawkins, The greatest show on earth.Vasily Grossman, A writer at war : Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945.James E. Hansen, Storms of my grandchildren [dnf].Cecilia Lindqvist, China : empire of the written symbol.David J. C. MacKay, Sustainable energy - without the hot air.John Man, The Great Wall.Arthur Ransome, Rod and line.Arthur Ransome, Swallows and Amazons.

2008Jared Diamond, Guns, germs and steel.Jared Diamond, The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee.Richard Fortey, The earth : an intimate history.John Man, The terracotta army : China's first emperor and the birth of a nation.Douglas Palmer, Seven million years : the story of human evolution.Peter Parsons, City of the sharp-nosed fish : Greek lives in Roman Egypt.Fred Pearce, Confessions of an eco-sinner : travels to find where my stuff comes from.Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the word : a language history of the world.Hilary Aidan St George Saunders, Valiant voyaging.Bee Wilson, The hive : the story of the honeybee and us.

I rediscovered reading non-fiction in 2006, with Norman Davies, 'The isles'. Previously I'd been reading pretty aimlessly, mainly fiction, including revisiting favourite Isaac Azimov, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett titles. I certainly didn't keep a note of what I'd read. The only other books that really out from this period are the first four of Patrick O'Brian's 'Master and commander' series, which I read as my 1996 paperback editions were published.

Starting in 2006, the next few years were dominated by recent popular history and popular science titles.

An exception was Arthur Ransome's 'Rod and line', first published in 1929, and which came my way towards the end of 2009. I'd always thought that a rounded character should know their whiskies and sherries, and probably ought to be able to tie a fly. These days whisky gives me heart-burn, but 'Rod and line', a collection of newspaper columns, seemed like an easy way into armchair fishing. This led to a fascination with all things Ransome, including the 'Swallows and Amazons' series, the reintroduction of fiction into my reading, as well as threads of sailing and fishing books. Which sees me to the end of 2012.

I know what books I read in which years during the period 2006-2012. But as to the order, all I can say is that I started with 'The isles', and ended with Robert Louis Stevenson, 'Travels with a donkey in the Cevennes', which I finished over Christmas 2012, and followed with his 'Treasure island' as my first book of 2013. I resolved to read more children's classics from 2013, which good intention lasted about fifteen months before being swamped by The Mariners Library (continuing) and other Rupert Hart-Davis (petered out) and cruising books (continuing). Topped off in late 2014 by a resolution to read through Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels (continuing). And the popular science has been sneaking back in as well.